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One EV X-Line System Delivers at London’s Biggest Shows

Britannia Row’s Electro-Voice X-Line PA has truly earned its stripes this summer. Within the space of just one month, one system has played to nearly 150,000 music fans at London’s two outdoor festivals in Hyde Park, and audiences in excess of 200,000 at three high-profile concerts in the brand-new Wembley Stadium.

In London, the "festival" format of the Wireless and Hyde Park Calling events is uniquely urban, with most fans attending for a single day. Topping the bill on different days were Peter Gabriel, Aerosmith, The Kaiser Chiefs, White Stripes, Faithless and Daft Punk. For the fifth successive year, Brit Row put forward the EV X-Line system as the main PA for summer events in Hyde Park - "tweaked and trimmed each year to accommodate changes in the site configuration and because we're always trying to work out how to do it better," says Bryan Grant. "This year, the arrays were flown quite a lot wider, on the outside of the video screens. The side hangs were therefore very close to the main system hangs; not conventional, but I was pleased with how well that worked."

From Hyde Park, the EV inventory was shipped across town to the new £800 million national stadium in Wembley. With live audiences of 70,000, The Concert For Diana, staged to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, was watched by many millions around the world. The Live Earth event a week later in the same venue featured 22 of the world’s top artistes, and, linked to other major concerts on every continent, was watched by an estimated 2 billion people worldwide.

Why does Britannia Row wheel out its X-Line system for these large-scale events? Grant says: "We do have other tools in our toolbox, but this does so well for the multipurpose shows, especially in big spaces, and I love the sound of it."

The EV system used for Concert for Diana, Live Earth and, just one night later, by Metallica, consisted of main left and right hangs (24 XLS+4 XLT), flown sub bass hangs (24 Xline subs), side left and right hangs (28 XLS), up stage side hangs (24 Outline Butterfly), stacked subs (24 Xline subs) and 50 delay speakers. For the upper tiers, Britannia Row tied into the Wembley house system.

Says Grant: “We used a lot of distributed fire power to fill the space and, thanks to the construction of the stadium roof area, even with Metallica, we didn't upset the n eighbours while achieving levels of over 104db at the console (a challenging 77 metres from the downstage edge).”

In the stadium to mix front-of-house for Razorlight, engineer Ian Laughton gave his impressions of the Live Earth experience. “It was an amazing day, to walk into the new Wembley stadium after all these years, and to see my favourite PA system flown there. I won’t leave home without the EV X-Line system and have used it on the last two Razorlight arena tours. I was mixing on a DigiCo D5 console, which isn’t my normal desk, but I wasn’t worried because of the X-Line system – the coverage and quality is fantastic.”

Bryan Grant says he's ecstatic about the success of the Wembley events. "X-Line is the ideal system for a multi-band bill, as these two events demonstrate. At Concert for Diana, the musical mood was MOR, easy listening, a bit of orchestra, a bit of pop. Live Earth had a much more rocky bill, going from Genesis to the Pussycat Dolls to the Foo Fighters, so X-Line had to deal with that sort of weight. And then there's Metallica, full-on heavy rock, and we had to fill a stadium where the top seat is 47 metres above the pitch. X-Line has the flexibility to deal with the changes in conditions and the changes in demands."

Metallica's big London date attracted 70,000 heavy metal fans to the stadium, but the band also contributed to the Live Earth festival the day before. "The PA output for Live Earth was attenuated for the TV show, and we had presenter platforms and B stages and all sorts of things in front of the PA. Consequently, Metallica's front-of-house engineer 'Big' Mick Hughes was concerned that the X-Line system would be loud enough for their own show."

Overnight, Brit Row's systems technicians changed the front-of-house and monitor positions, and reattenuated the system to give a lot more energy between the downstage edge and the mix position. According to Grant, “it worked really well in the end – Mick was happy."

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One EV X-Line System Delivers at London’s Biggest Shows

19th July 2007

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